Possible futures, and nodebotting

Sun Jul 26 2015 00:11:32 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)

You might remember that I was sorting out my music collection. This involves having to use iTunes for adding cover art and editing metadata and blah blah because I'm using a Mac and it seems that everyone has given up on making anything (anything!) better than iTunes.

So iTunes is this big huge mass of software that attempts to do everything at the same time and does nothing particularly well, and we're all using it because there's not much more else available. Talk about user choice, wooops.

I never know whether to cry at the immense UI failure that iTunes is or just laugh at it so ironically being the flagship product at Apple

When using iTunes I'm afraid to click on buttons because I do not know what havoc will that unravel. Things move around without explanation

There are buttons that turn into something else, something elses that act like buttons, data losses, weirdnesses, ugh

The worst is: there doesn't seem to be anything better in Mac? (!?) ?PLEASE PROVE ME WRONG, I BEG YOU ?

Someone suggested Vox, which I haven't tried yet. But seriously--only one suggestion! is that all that there is? I ended up thinking again about writing my own "player". Except it would not be a player, or at least, not just a player, but I was thinking more about a sort of jukebox with sync. Of course I have other things to do right now so that's probably not going to happen unless I win the lottery I don't play.

I was in a good mood this morning so I decided to pretend I was funny and laugh at this whole mess with another tweet parade:

the year is 2030.you can do grocery shopping, pay council tax, vote for your fav eurovision artist and resolve git conflicts with iTunes

in 2045 iTunes finally gains sentience and writes the code for you. all commit messages mention titles of U2 songs

2525 it is revealed that iTunes has acquired Skynet (to the tune of Visage's In the Year 2525 but poignantly sung by Bono)

3001: Frank Poole begs to be killed again by HAL 9000 when he sees iSkynet in action

And instead of sitting back and maliciously grin at the idea of this actually happening and how 2030 is in fact quite close in time and I could be saying "I told you so" in only 15 years, I grabbed my bike to go to Tableflip, the home of Nodebots in London, for a lighterweight NodeBots day.

Good things: it was a gorgeous day (specially compared to yesterday's where it poured with rain for about 90% of the time), and I got lost in Dulwich which is a beautiful, albeit very adhoc and non-grid at all area, so it's even a pleasure to get lost and wander around those streets.

Bad things: there was nothing bad about getting lost because there was absolutely no rush at any point during the day.

Oli was a fantastic host and he made us bacon sarnies and coffee. Their space is a-ma-zing. It's full of tools old and new, and equipment and things and dust from sawing and weird mechanical and chemical smells, and flying things in various sizes and shapes, and there's some other business where someone is building bikes. BIKES!!! It's all super cool and I came back very excited about making stuff, even if I just managed to sort of use Johnny Five to control a servo:

Meanwhile, Tom was hacking on his Maschina and making it emit various sounds with JavaScript, Alex was transferring PCB positives onto another surface using an electric iron and two other guys were doing fantastic hacky stuff as well. I also got to hear about Fritzing and it looks really good.

I'm glad I got to use part of the equipment in the Spark core kit I got at JSConf.US 2014 which I still hadn't had time to use. I'm sad I didn't get to use the Spark core itself because the nodeschool nodebots workshop is designed for Arduinos and I wanted to see something happen physically and not just emulated, but I am certain I'll be able to research this before iTunes can also talk to Spark devices via iPay or whatever.

Playing with hardware is fun. I am an almost total newbie in this field. I keep forgetting which pin is the N pin for LEDs (it's the short one, I just looked it up today). I keep forgetting how to read resistors and how to connect things together. It's all fine: it's on the internets, somewhere, or alternatively it comes back to me once I get started. I have absolutely no expectations for what I'll do and so I can't let myself down if I forget everything from the last time I played with hardware. It's OK. It's a game. It's fine to forget the rules, you can always re-read them.